China’s trade with countries participating in its ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has been expanding and totaled 9.27 trillion yuan ($1.34 trillion) in 2019, customs data shows.

It has outpaced the country’s aggregate trade growth by 7.4 percentage points, according to the data.

More than $60 billion in investments have been promised under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), said Zou Zhiwu, vice minister of the General Administration of Customs.

The Raging Twenties started with a bang with the targeted assassination of Iran’s General Qasem Soleimani.

Yet a bigger bang awaits us throughout the decade: the myriad declinations of the New Great Game in Eurasia, which pits the US against Russia, China and Iran, the three major nodes of Eurasia integration.

For as long as I’ve been alive, my country has been a rogue state.

Actually, the US became a rogue state four years before my birth in 1949 when, in 1945, Washington decided to bomb two militarily insignificant cities in Japan with its new super weapon, the atomic bomb, instantly incinerating several hundred thousand Japanese civilians, including many, many children, and condemning at least that many more to slow agonizing deaths from resulting cancers and birth defects.

European Union foreign ministers at a meeting in Brussels will focus on finding ways on how to bring Tehran back into the nuclear deal, after its decision to scrap the deal's enrichment limits, Slovakia’s foreign minister said on Friday.

“The steps they announced are reversible and verification by the [nuclear watchdog] IAEA is ongoing, but we are not happy with the step five that was announced,” Miroslav Lajcakbut told reporters on arrival at the meeting.

“We hope that we can help Iran return to the game,” the minister added.

Empires are built through the creation or acquisition of wealth. The Roman Empire came about through the productivity of its people and its subsequent acquisition of wealth from those that it invaded. The Spanish Empire began with productivity and expanded through the use of its large armada of ships, looting the New World of its gold. The British Empire began through localized productivity and grew through its creation of colonies worldwide—colonies that it exploited, bringing the wealth back to England to make it the wealthiest country in the world.

Authorities in Sweden have been accused of mislabelling explosions and bombings and classifying incidents as “damage” in order to distort the true extent of explosions across the country.

At least 250 soldiers are expected to join the UN peacekeeping force helping France to contain the deadly jihadi threat in the Sahel region of Africa.

Drawn from the Light Dragoons and 2nd Battalion Royal Anglian Regiment, the contingent currently includes six female soldiers, attached to medical, logistical and military police sections.

But a new UN directive for peacekeeping operations lays down quotas for the number of female soldiers deployed.

And last night senior officers expressed their frustration as they face having to include at least another 12 female soldiers for next year’s deployment while planning for what is anticipated to be a ”highly kinetic” operation - a euphemism for active warfare.

Although they were locked in a convoluted struggle concerning the impeachment of President Trump, Republicans and Democrats in the Senate laid down their arms in order to vote, in quasi-unanimity, for the imposition of heavy sanctions on the companies participating in the construction of North Stream 2, the doubling of the gas pipeline which delivers Russian gas to Germany across the Baltic Sea. The main victims were the European companies which had helped finance the 11 billion dollar project with the Russian company Gazprom. The project is now 80 % finished. The Austrian company Omy, British/Dutch Royal Dutch Shell, French Engie, German companies Uniper and Wintershall, Italian Saipem and Swiss Allseas are also taking part in the laying of the pipeline.

Twenty-nineteen could best be described as a year when Donald Trump’s foreign policy unraveled on so many fronts. It became ever more erratic, one-sided and personalized, changing with the US president’s mood swings. The crisis, as many would call it, has been a long time in the making, and the implications will surely cast a long shadow over the new decade.

Trump, a self-proclaimed deal maker, is floundering as much internationally as he is domestically. The US, on his watch, arguably has less leverage with its allies than it has had at any time in modern history. Trump’s foreign policies—from the Middle East and North Korea to Venezuela— have largely failed

Does Mr. Trump really not grasp that his sanctions left and right – and now on the Russian-German gas pipeline Nord Stream 2 – is committing economic suicide, not for himself, of course, but for the United States? He attempts to punish not only Russia, but all the corporations, construction companies, Russian, German and from everywhere, which collaborated and are still working on the final stretch of the1,250 km pipeline.

Although they were locked in a convoluted struggle concerning the impeachment of President Trump, Republicans and Democrats in the Senate laid down their arms in order to vote, in quasi-unanimity, for the imposition of heavy sanctions on the companies participating in the construction of North Stream 2, the doubling of the gas pipeline which delivers Russian gas to Germany across the Baltic Sea. The main victims were the European companies which had helped finance the 11 billion dollar project with the Russian company Gazprom.

The project is now 80 % finished. The Austrian company Omy, British/Dutch Royal Dutch Shell, French Engie, German companies Uniper and Wintershall, Italian Saipem and Swiss Allseas are also taking part in the laying of the pipeline.

In a 2019 talk for Yale University, Vernon Bogdanor, one of Britain’s most famed constitutional experts claimed Mr Macmillan, who at the time was Housing Minister, chillingly predicted that Europe was going to transform into a fully-fledged federal state even before Britain joined the bloc.

Mr Bogdanor said: “In March 1953, Macmillan asked the Cabinet: ‘Are we really sure that we want to see a sixth power federal Europe with a common army, a common iron and steel industry, ending in a common currency and monetary policy?

“‘If such a federal state comes into being, will it be in the long run be in our interests whether as an island or as an imperial power?’

“‘Will not Germany ultimately control this state?’

“And may have we not created the very situation in Europe to prevent which in every century since the Elizabethan age we have fought long and bitter wars?’”

Spain has joined Poland in becoming the second country this week to claim it could ditch the EU, amid growing fury at the power that Brussels holds over member-states. Spain’s third biggest party Vox is under huge pressure to back the Spanish version of the Brexit referendum, following growing fury at an ECJ ruling this week. Vox’s own party president lambasted the EU, claiming when the ECJ overruled Spanish courts, it had humiliated the country and its sovereignty.

On Thursday, the EU's top court ruled a jailed Catalan separatist leader should have parliamentary immunity.

Oriol Junqueras was one of nine pro-independence leaders jailed in Spain after an illegal independence referendum.

However, in May he was elected to the European Parliament as an MEP.

The ruling rejected Madrid's arguments that Mr Junqueras did not qualify as an MEP because he had not sworn an oath to the Spanish constitution.

First, I do not think Putin and Russia will abandon the Republics. It would be cowardly, unprincipled and futile to do so, and these are adjectives that simply do not apply to Putin or to Russia.

And Putin has also said, and I quote, "I learned on the streets of Leningrad as a kid, if a fight is inevitable, it is better to hit first." I am quite certain that Vladimir Putin will stand by his words, by his promises and his principles, and the Russian People will back him 100%.

Putin has promised that if Russia is attacked, he will destroy the places the attacks come from, and also the places where the orders for the attacks come from. And Vladimir Putin don't lie.

If you allow your corrupt and bloodthirsty rulers to attack us, understand that we will hit back, hard, where you live, and understand that you will have it coming.

Otherwise, your masters will proceed with this diabolical scheme and the whole world may well come crashing down around your heads.

The U.S. crossed the Rubicon this week. And I’m not talking about the ridiculous impeachment of President Trump for doing his job.

I’m talking about passing the NDAA with provisions to sanction ‘from hell’ anyone associated with completion of the Nordstream 2 pipeline. The U.S. is now openly dismissive as a matter of law any ally or partner who engages in economic activity it disapproves of.

Editor of InTheSnow magazine, Patrick Thorne, told The Times: 'This is turning into one of the best starts to a season this century for most of the ski world.

'This is thanks to large and regular snow dumps since early November, the latest of which is coming this weekend.'

At least 15cm of snow is expected to fall over the alps across three days next week, according to forecasters, and resorts in France could receive as much as 25cm tomorrow and on Monday.

In the Austrian alps snow fall is expected every day from Sunday to Friday, except Thursday, and in the Italian alps snowfall is expected right through until Tuesday. Switzerland is also expecting snow in places over the next five days.

The Dutch supreme court on Friday ordered the government to slash greenhouse gases by at least 25 per cent by the end of 2020 in a landmark case brought by an environmental group.

Campaigners from the Urgenda group cheered as judges dismissed an appeal by Prime Minister Mark Rutte's government against two earlier rulings telling it to cut emissions.

The men, aged 30 and 32, were convicted in a Stockholm court this week of raping the woman for hours in an apartment in the city while threatening her with a knife.

The pair were sentenced to five years in jail and ordered to pay the victim £11,000 each, and prosecutors also requested they be deported for a minimum of 15 years.

But the court ruled against it after a migration board warned they would face obstacles over human rights concerns.

An expensive upgrade to a fleet of armoured vehicles in Belgium will disqualify most soldiers from using it because the modifications have drastically reduced the size of the interior.

With some of the tallest people in the world, an average Belgian man measures 5ft 10in but the internal cabin will hold no one above 5ft 7in.

In a drive to improve safety of their fleet of 44 Pandur armoured cars, the Belgian military spent £26 million but made them too small.

How badly does Washington want NATO to survive? Bad enough to betray the Greeks again and to reignite the Cyprus killing fields, that’s how bad. News the US Congress is expected to approve a bill lifting an arms embargo on Cyprus, which has been in place since 1987, can mean only one thing.

According to the news from Washington, the embargo on arms sales will be lifted once Congress passes the National Defense Authorization Act for 2020. Once President Trump signs the bill, US exports to the Republic of Cyprus of “defense-related” materials will add guns to what has always been a volatile situation. Recent Turkey-Greece friction already signaled a rekindling of old war fires, and now the US comes out and flatly admits that the Republic of Cyprus needs to be part of the “Partnership for Peace” NATO program.

American conservatives are concerned that we are a step or two behind Europe in committing open-borders suicide. But if you actually look at the numbers, in many respects America is blazing the trail to destruction much more swiftly than Europe.

A recent Pew Research report estimated the entire illegal immigrant population of Europe is 3.9-4.8 million. That is for an entire continent of 747 million people. The U.S. is less than half the size, yet the estimates of the illegal alien population range from 11 million to as high as 22 million.

Figures form IHS Markit showed the country’s purchasing managers’ index (PMI) fell to 43.4 in December from 44.1 the previous month, the first downward movement in three months. The result was worse than the 44.5 reading predicted by economists in a survey by Reuters. And the eurozone also saw a drop in the PMI, an index of prevailing direction of economic trends in manufacturing and services.

A survey showed it fell from 46.9 in November to 45.9 in December, marking 11 months in a row of contraction.

An unparalleled evacuation operation is underway in Italy’s southern city of Brindisi, after a heavy British bomb was found near a local cinema. This is the second bomb discovery that has put Italians on alert in just one month.

Roughly 54,000 people were told to leave the so-called “red zone” on Sunday morning as local authorities and the military prepared to defuse a 500-pound bomb which Britain's Royal Air Force dropped on the city in 1941.

Over 60 percent of locals were affected by the evacuation, which turns out to be the largest since the war, according to Corriere della Serra.

Two parachutes on the ExoMars rover are supposed to deploy as part of an intricate design to slow its descent onto the surface of the Red Planet.

Delay caused by the flunked tests has put the timeline of next year's timeline in jeopardy, with engineers only giving the mission a 50 per cent chance of launching on time.

ESA space engineers are hoping that colleagues across the Atlantic will be able to help solve the problem in time for the scheduled window of July 26 and August 12, 2020.

If this window is missed, the already escalating costs will continue to soar, and a launch will not go ahead until at least 2022.

For the 1.2 million Polish-Jews and their descendants living in Israel alone, there is a growing elite consensus that they are entitled to parts of Poland that they claim their ancestors used to own. Before WW2, Jews owned the most valuable real estate in the centers of major cities and towns, while Poles were concentrated in rural parts. Warsaw was 30% Jewish ... Today, international Jewry has abandoned communism for world capitalism, and is using Donald Trump's America to "strangle" us. The weapon of choice is S447 (Justice for Uncompensated Survivors Today ... If this law is put into practice, approximately 30% of Warsaw homeowners will be forced to pay "rent" to random Jews claiming to be Holocaust survivors or their descendants in New York City and Tel Aviv.
Note: Be sure and read the comments!

...Italian women are more likely to be victims of sexual harassment or so-called “minor sexual assaults” than foreign women are...

URSULA VON DER LEYEN congratulated Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party on their "victory" in the general election and outlined the next phases of the Brexit process.

The President of the European Commission said the EU want their relationship with Britain to be "as close as possible" and said they were aiming for a "zero tariff, zero quota, zero dumping" arrangement". She revealed that the European Council has again tasked the European Commission to be the European Union's negotiator with Britain. Ursula von der Leyen also declared the European Union will be prepared from February 1 to "go to work" regarding the Brexit process.